*BSD News Article 42767


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
Subject: Re: [Q] FreeBSD 2.0R - fdisk is non-destructive?
Message-ID: <D4F49H.7wC@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh
References: <LIM.95Feb20014925@telerobotics.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 1995 20:15:17 GMT
Lines: 20

In article <LIM.95Feb20014925@telerobotics.jpl.nasa.gov> lim@robotics.jpl.nasa.gov writes:
>I just installed FreeBSD 2.0-R from the Walnut CD-ROM on a 1 Gbyte drive. I
>created two slices one for DOS and one for FreeBSD. When I boot DOS, I run
>fdisk, and it shows the slice sizes correctly. However, the DOS dir command
>still reports free space relative to the entire disk. E.g. it says 100 Mbytes
>used, 900 Mbytes free. Is this just a DOS bug of some sort? I'm worried that
>DOS will overwrite sectors assigned to FreeBSD.

You need to re-format the DOS partition.  You have a 1Gb file system in
a smaller partition, and it will indeed trash your BSD partition if you
overfill it.  There are programs that will non-destructively resize a
DOS partition, I believe.

Incidentally, I believe that even running DOS format won't work with
recent versions of DOS, since it recognises that the disk is already
formatted and just writes something to say it's empty (so you can
"unformat" it).  If you trash the DOS partition from BSD that will
probably do the trick.

-- Richard